ART/ARCHITECTURE

ART/ARCHITECTURE; When Japan Adopted The Camera as Its Very Own

By VICKI GOLDBERG

Published: March 23, 2003

Correction Appended

HOUSTON—
WHEN Commodore Perry sailed into Japan the second time, in 1854, to conclude a treaty opening that country to the West, he brought the modern world to a land that was still feudal, that still fought wars with swords and that still manufactured almost everything by hand. In astonishingly short order, the Japanese began adopting and adapting technologies and Western ways. A struggle began -- it has never entirely ceased -- to achieve a balance between Western modernity and Japanese tradition.

Aboard one of Perry's ships was a photographer, who brought with him a revelation that the Japanese would assimilate, accommodate and change. Japanese photographers, taught by Westerners, soon documented their country's momentous journey into a new epoch.

By the early 20th century, the art of Japanese photography would be internationally recognized, only to be in effect forgotten by the rest of the world as Japanese militarism rose in the 1930's. In the 1970's, Japanese photography reappeared in the West, but no exhibition ever addressed its history comprehensively, even in Japan. One Japanese curator said that tracking his own country's photographic history would be like asking fish to analyze water.

But now ''The History of Japanese Photography'' at the Museum of Fine Arts here provides an eye-opening introduction to photographic and Japanese history in more than 200 pictures. Most of these images are entirely unknown here, and Anne Wilkes Tucker, the museum's curator of photography, said that what with earthquakes, fires and wars, some 75 percent of them are unique or one of two surviving prints. Make no mistake about it: it isn't often that this much new material illuminating this much history comes over the horizon.

The story of how photography was absorbed into non-Western societies and how styles and subjects were reconfigured by cultural differences has yet to be written. In Japan, unsurprisingly, photography began with portraits; as factories were founded and urban centers grew, the new middle class acquired the privilege of owning its own image. Camera portraits were considered so truthful that brothel patrons would select bed partners from photographs.

The culture elastically reshaped portraiture. Small images were enclosed in wooden cases; samurai posed with their legs spread wide; an old woman might be seated in profile off at the edge in a large, blank space; one photographer pictured himself, before 1870, with a great open-mouthed smile, an expression virtually unknown in photography elsewhere at that date. In one startling image by Matsusaburo Yokoyama, a hand-colored photograph of a Japanese man is held by a painting of a fellow who appears to be Caucasian, in a space occupied by paintings of two palettes and a framed picture.

The progress of Westernization was written on citizens' backs: some men posed in kimonos with Western shoes or hats or furled umbrellas. In 1872, the first picture of the Emperor Meiji showed him in traditional garb; the next year he wore a fancy, Western-style military uniform. This second picture was distributed to public offices and schools, and though private sales were prohibited, photographers rushed to copy and sell it. General circulation of the emperor's image simply did not exist before.

There was one market for foreigners, another for Japanese. Tourists particularly liked hand-colored images (some in melting, candy-box hues), and famous sites, picturesque poor folk, samurai (dashingly imitated by actors after samurai were outlawed) and geishas (usually prostitutes gussied up above their station).

Landscape, that staple of Japanese art, followed close behind portraiture. Some landscapes, panoramas especially, were mounted on paper scrolls with silk borders, a practice that, so far as the curators can tell, is unknown anywhere else. (In addition to Ms. Tucker, the curators are Dana Friis-Hansen of the Austin Museum of Art, Ryuichi Kaneko of the Nagoya City Art Museum and Joe Takeba of the Museum of Photography in Tokyo). These mounted landscapes must have been a new sensation for the viewer, too. Scrolls, which are unrolled with one hand while being rerolled with the other, are generally narrative and experienced over time, like a book or a movie. A set view of a harbor is a different thing altogether.

Then, too, vanishing-point perspective, though it was known from Western paintings, had been largely dismissed by Japanese painters, so photography presented a new way of regarding space. Still, photographers sometimes picked viewpoints that blocked receding perspectives and ironed space into a semblance of Japanese painting.

The government quickly understood the uses of documentary photography, commissioning pictures of the Japanese islands and of cultural treasures in the 1870's and 80's. Photographic records kept the emperor and officials up to date; photographs were distributed to the populace to remind them of how effective the government was. When Japan waged war against China in 1894 and Russia in 1904, widely published photographs contributed to public awareness that what was once a collection of warlike fiefdoms had become a unified (and powerful) nation-state. Though cameras could not yet capture battle action, pictures of destroyed enemy ships and dead enemy soldiers sang loud enough of war and victory.

Correction: March 30, 2003, Sunday Because of an editing error, a picture caption last Sunday about the exhibition ''The History of Japanese Photography'' at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston misstated the date of a work by Matsusaburo Yokoyama. It was late 19th century, not late 20th century.